May 14, 2010

Cannes 2010: Day 3, "Wall Street 2"

“Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” is the money version of “The Color of Money,” revisiting a charismatic scoundrel two decades after he first hit the screen, the way Martin Scorsese caught up with the hustler of "The Hustler" a little past his prime but full of wiles.

Director Oliver Stone’s sequel to “Wall Street” opens commercially this fall. Today, as an out-of-competition offering, it made its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, although at least one market screening, at one of the many small multiplex cinemas near the Palais du Festivals, was held Wednesday.

On an initial bleary-eyed encounter “Wall Street 2” strikes me as a fairly diverting unnecessary movie. (My Chicago colleague Patrick McGavin, reviewing for emanuellevy.com, gave a B-, calling it “something of a structural mess” but “certainly entertaining.”) The set-up, from screenwriters Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, delivers fallen Wall Street giant Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas, clearly glad to be back in the role that won him an Oscar) back onto the mean, green streets of American capitalism after eight years in the can. On the way out the prison door, the guard hands him the few possessions he entered with. They include “one gold money clip…with no money in it.”

Most of Stone’s film takes place before the financial meltdown of 2008, which the sequel uses as the backdrop for Gekko’s return to high-stakes chicanery, this time with phrases such as “toxic subprime debt” and “credit swap default” littering the dialogue. Shia LaBeouf gets the Charlie Sheen role as Gekko’s morally conflicted protégé (he’s into clean energy, which makes him more sympathetic, so the thinking goes, than if he were simply being into the stuff that never sleeps). He’s to be married to Gekko’s estranged daughter, played by Carey Mulligan. This character runs a “lefty website” with a “shoestring” budget; what we see on screen looks like the combined staff of The New York Times and The Guardian, luxuriating in the most fabulous loft space on the planet.

Well, realism isn’t Stone’s game, and never was. The family melodrama is routine, despite the satisfactions delivered by the cast. But it’s interesting to watch Stone and company wrestle whole chunks of recent history into the confines of that melodrama. Josh Brolin plays the head of a Goldman Sachs-type house of cards, the straw villain of the piece. Charlie Sheen turns up at a charity ball for a cameo, looking like a guy who makes “Two and a Half Men” money.

Weirdly -- and this may hurt the film’s chances this fall -- “Wall Street 2” goes soft on its main reason for existing. It would’ve been dull seeing the same old Gekko, to be sure. But his matchmaking duties this time out, however shadowy, defang the man. And wouldn’t this character at least betray a teensy bit of envy for all millions made by the hedge-fund wizards who came up after him?

That’s the irony: So many legally sanctioned Wall Street gamblers made their hay after buying, wholesale, the glamorously unscrupulous image put forth by the original “Wall Street.”

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